


Encantado

by Draco_sollicitus



Series: Short but Sometimes Sweet: Damerey Collection [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Bilingual Poe, College AU, F/M, Fluff, Language Barrier, Misunderstandings, Modern AU, Rey is a Math major, SUCH FLUFF, meet cute, tutoring au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-27 02:31:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14415732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Draco_sollicitus/pseuds/Draco_sollicitus
Summary: Rey shows up for her tutoring session at Crait Library on campus. She overslept (and almost missed the email requesting her as a tutor), so she doesn't have time to check the name or the specific subject.But she shows up. As a sophomore, she's the youngest math tutor on campus, and the only female tutor. She'll die before grad assistant Ben Solo learns that she let down the tutor pool.Problems arise when her tutee shows up. For starters, he speaks to her only in Spanish, and Rey hasn't studied Spanish since high school. Still, he clearly needs her help in math, so she'll try her best and make do with the situation.It also doesn't help that this "Poe" guy is so darn attractive.





	Encantado

**Author's Note:**

> Some Spanish throughout, but the meaning of the phrases is made pretty clear by the context/Rey's POV 
> 
> Disclaimer: I am not a native speaker, and there are probably mistakes!

 

Rey sprints into the Tutor Zone at Crait Library and scans the room wildly.

Her tutoring session in math starts in about three minutes, and she isn’t even sure if she’s here for a boy or a girl. The Tutor Zone is completely empty, but she doesn’t have her laptop with her, so she just prays whoever signed up for this time slot will walk over to her when they arrive.

She’s glad she beat them here, though. She’d never hear the end of it if she missed a session, at least from Ben Solo, the jerkwad graduate student who always leers at her during office hours with Professor Skywalker. He’s just mad that an undergrad is taking grad courses, she tells herself. It’s not leering, it’s glaring.

It might be the same thing from him, she thinks, and then shudders. Rey has a feeling that most people expect her to be flattered that, as a sophomore, the nephew of the best professor on campus and the son of two board members at the university has any interest at all in her.

She’s not flattered, though. She’s mostly annoyed. Still, today can be a victory, and she can help someone in the meantime.

Rey settles herself down and takes out her calculators – four function and a TI-89 – and a notebook, a whiteboard, and some dry erase markers and regular pencils. She straightens the pencils into neat rows, humming cheerfully to herself.

It’s exactly 3:00 on the dot when she hears, “Rachel?” An attractive boy – a man, even, maybe he’s a senior – stands there, a messenger bag slung over his shoulder.

Not really her name, but she smiles at him and nods. She’s gotten weirder interpretations of Rey, after all.

“ _¿_ Hola, cómo estas hoy?” The man asks, in an attractive voice.

Huh. That’s an interesting greeting for a math session. Still, she knows the response to that, from Spanish I as a high school freshman. “Muy bien, y tú?”

“¡¡Bien!!” He looks delighted at the exchange and settles down in the seat across from her. He stares at her calculators briefly and then smiles up at her.

Rey smiles at him, awkwardly, unsure how to ask her next question. She doesn’t want to be offensive, but she does need to know. “No Inglés?”

“No!” He says cheerfully. “No Inglés, nunca.” Oh no. Her tutee … doesn’t speak English. Oh. Oh God. There must have been some slip-up with the scheduling.

Still, he needs a math tutor. She can do this. There’s no one else here to make fun of her for how bad her Spanish is, she can do this.

“Soy Rey,” she says, extending her hand.

“Me llamo Poe,” he says, much slower this time, enunciating every syllable. Maybe he’s catching on that she doesn’t know that much Spanish. _Sigh_. Well, he came all this way, and he isn’t hard on the eyes.

Okay, so he’s gorgeous. Dark hair, bright eyes, nice smile, five o’clock shadow over a strong jaw.

God. This can’t be appropriate.

 “¿Tienes un libro _?”_ Rey asks timidly.

 _“_ No. No necesita un libro para la estudia de la vida.”

Something about studying and life, okay, but…yeah, she can make this work.

“Okay,” Rey smiles at him and pats the table across from her. Math is the same in every language. She can do this. She has paper, and a pen, and a can-do attitude. This guy needs her help, and she’s the best damn math tutor on campus.

Rey fumbles around in her brain of how to ask him what he wants to go over. She wishes she had a smart phone so that Siri girl people are always talking about could help her.

 She settles on: _“_ _¿_ Que quieres estudiar en este sesión _?_ “ Without a textbook, she has no idea if he’s here to study Algebra, or Discrete Math. God, she hopes it’s algebra. Really, arithmetic is preferable, given how little Spanish she knows.

“Nosotros podemos estudiar en la tema de tu preferencia.” Poe looks utterly unbothered by this situation, and Rey’s obvious lack of linguistic skills.

Tema? Tema means…subject. Rey thinks. It’s been a hot minute since high school Spanish. Is he trying to clarify what subject they’re here for? Oh God, why didn’t she keep studying foreign languages. Ms. Kanata was right, she wasn’t preparing herself for the world. Maybe Poe wants to know her qualifications on the subject? “Yo se….mucho? de la tema de matematicas _?_ ” Rey tries her hardest to make it not sound like a question, because she _does_ know mucho, mucho math, but she is _really_ bad at Spanish.

Poe looks so thrilled though, she doesn’t want to question it. “Bien, bien,” he says, bouncing in his seat.

She slides the paper across the table at him and haltingly begins to ask him what he knows about Algebra.

Not a lot, apparently. Or she’s just really bad at translating his questions and answers to her own questions. Poe’s smile doesn’t waver, and she finds herself getting lost in that smile more than once over the course of the hour.

She looks up at the clock after trying to explain factoring in a different language and notices it’s been forty-eight minutes. Poe doesn’t look any closer to understanding math, and she feels like a failure. It’s too much, suddenly, and Rey hasn’t always been the best at expressing her emotions, in any language.

“I’m sorry,” Rey wails, slamming her head into her notebook. She keeps talking into the lined paper. “I’m sorry, you’re so nice, and I don’t know any Spanish, and I’m not very good at English either, and you probably just want to pass your class, so I’ll find you a new tutor, one who speaks Spanish. I think Cassian Andor might be free on Thursdays. He never responds to the list-serv, but I can text his girlfriend, Jyn’s pretty good at responding, but oh God,” When she looks up, Poe’s smiling at her, politely, confused, “God, this is so rude of me, talking at you in English, and you’re so cute, and I’m so, so sorry and –”

“Why would it be rude for you to talk to me in English?” He asks, politely, completely unaccented.

“You speak English?” Rey screeches. “Why on _earth_ would you let me jabber at you in Spanish, then?”

“How else would I tutor you in Spanish?” Poe asks her, looking confused but heavily entertained all the same.

“Tutor…tutor _me?_ Nuh-uh, I’m here to tutor you, in math.” Rey freezes and looks at him. “You aren’t….here for math?”

“Well, to be fair, I am really bad at math, so I’d probably need a tutor, if I didn’t already declare a Humanities major, three years ago.” Poe grins at her, and she’d smack him if he weren’t so cute. Probably a learned behavior of his, smile pretty so no one smacks him for being cheeky. “But no, I’m here to tutor a freshman in Spanish. I’m guessing Rey isn’t short for Rachel.”

“And I’m guessing you’re not – whoever I agreed to tutor. I’ll be honest, I didn’t even look at the name.” Rey groans and buries her face in her hands. “I was running late today, and oh God, I’m going to die of embarrassment.”

“Don’t die,” Poe says encouragingly, and she fights the urge to kick him under the table. “It was honestly very…endearing.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Rey grumbles. “I’m sorry for wasting your time.” _And mine._

“Rey, bonita, bella, that was not a waste of time.” Poe winks at her, and Rey blushes furiously. “And, to be fair, you definitely need a Spanish tutor.”

“Oh, hush,” Rey snaps, ears burning. “I’ll have you know I speak perfect French.”

“Tu parle français? C'est génial on peut parler en français!” Rey stares at him, dumbfounded, and Poe laughs. It’s a very, very nice laugh. “Sorry, linguistics major. Let me guess. You don’t actually speak French.”

“No,” Rey mumbles. “But I do know Java. And Python. And like three other coding languages.”

“I don’t!” Poe smiles at her. “You could teach me!”

“Mhm,” Rey mumbles, staring at the ground, wishing for it to swallow her whole and take her silly self away from this disastrous afternoon, away from this gorgeous man and his leather jacket and his wide smile.

“And I could keep teaching you Spanish,” Poe offers.

“Yeah, maybe,” Rey looks up at that and smiles at him. His answering grin is nothing short of blinding. “Are you a senior, then?”

“Yeah,” Poe nods, “But I’ll be around next year too, I just found out I was accepted into the fifth year program under old Qui Gon.”

“Oh, I like him,” Rey smiles. “We get tea sometimes.”

Poe stares at her for like, thirty seconds, and Rey shifts uncomfortably. “What?” She asks after the lengthy pause.

“You just…casually get tea with Qui Gon Jinn? Nobel Peace Prize winner, Qui Gon Jinn?” Poe clarifies, staring at her with wide eyes, and for the first time in the last hour, Rey feels like she may actually have _something_ that could impress him.

“Yeah, he and my foster father, Ben, go way back,” Rey smiles at him.

“Ben…Ben Kenobi? Ben Kenobi was your foster father?” Poe screeches. “He’s famous! Do you have any idea how much I idolized him as a kid? He’s an _astronaut,_ Rey! He has more days in space than anyone else. He’s _famous,_ Rey!”

“Yep.” Rey pops the ‘p’ extra obnoxiously. “I know. And trust me, he’s just as horrified as you are that I don’t know any languages.”

She and Poe keep talking for another twenty minutes, and then he looks at his watch.

“I gotta get going, Rey, I have an intramural soccer match across campus in an hour, and I’m sort of team captain.”

An actual flare of disappointment cuts through her. “Oh,” she nods, tapping her fingers on the table. “Okay. I’m going to stick around and get some work done.”

Poe stands up, but then leans over the table and takes a piece of paper and a pencil. He scrawls something down, and spends a few minutes with his pencil flying. Rey doesn’t stop looking at him because, well, again, he’s really pretty. Really. Pretty.

He catches her staring, and God, her face must be on fire. “So Rey, ¿quieres salir conmigo?” Poe asks her, grinning rakishly.

“Huh?” Rey asks, nose wrinkled.

“Look it up, Sunshine, and then give me your answer.” Poe slides the piece of paper across the table. “Hasta luego, Rey.”

“Hasta luego,” Rey returns, already grabbing the paper, nose wrinkled at him in confusion. Poe leaves, hands in his pockets and whistling; after he’s out of sight, she walks to a computer and logs in. Once the desktop is available, she pulls up Google Translate and types in the phrase he’d said to her.

“Quieres…salir… that means get out, right? Conmigo…” Rey mutters under her breath. When the translation comes through, her breath stutters.

Then, she looks down at the paper in her hand. There’s a phone number, and a small drawing of her writing at the desk, her tongue sticking out of her mouth, hair falling out of her three buns.

She doesn’t even hesitate in dialing the number on the paper. While it rings, the flip phone cradled between her ear and shoulder, she reverses the translator, types in an entry, and grins.

“Poe?” She asks after he picks up. “Me encantaría salir contigo.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> (Quieres salir conmigo = wanna go out with me)
> 
>  
> 
> There's definitely an idea for their date, Poe POV, if this universe is well liked ;)
> 
> Next up in the series:  
> Single!?Dad?!Poe?!


End file.
